VENOM & VELVET
He told me the night we met that he was not a good man.
He said it the way people confess to God, not to repent,
but because they already know forgiveness is never coming.
I should have run.
I am still running, straight back into his arms.
“She did not fall in love with him the way people fall in love in stories. She fell the way people fall from great heights fast, and with the full knowledge that the landing would kill her."
Moscow. November. The kind of cold that makes you understand why Russians drink. Seraphina Moreau is not supposed to be in this city. She is a forensic linguist on contract with Interpol, in Moscow for exactly seventy-two hours to collect a translated file and disappear. She is precise, she is invisible, and she has spent four years building a life out of being both.
Then she witnesses a murder in the lobby of the Metropol Hotel, and the last face she sees before she runs is the face of the man who ordered it.
Aleksei Volkov did not become the most feared name in Moscow's underworld by leaving loose ends. He is thirty-two years old, cold as the marble floors of his penthouse, and so ruthlessly in control of everything around him that he has forgotten what it feels like to be surprised.
Seraphina surprises him. He does the only logical thing, he takes her.
What begins as captivity becomes something neither of them has words for.
Forced together in the glittering, razor-edged world of Aleksei's empire, spanning Moscow's oligarch circles, Monaco's midnight deals, Istanbul's underground auctions, and Prague's ghost-lit backstreets, they orbit each other with the dangerous inevitability of two stars caught in the same gravitational pull. She sees through every wall he has built. He cannot decide whether to destroy her or keep her alive forever.
But Aleksei's world is a house of mirrors, and nothing inside it is what it appears.
His loyal brother is bleeding him from the inside. His past, a thirty-year-old war between two Russian families, is surfacing with the patience of a tide, slowly, then all at once. And Seraphina, who came to Moscow as a stranger, may hold the final key to a secret that predates both of them by a generation.
Venom & Velvet is a story about what we become when we love something we were built to destroy. It is about betrayal so intimate it redefines the word. About guilt that wears the face of love. About the precise, terrible moment when you realize the person who has been ruining your life and the person who has been saving it are the same.